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I LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, if 

Chap. ..E...XL^ 
Shelf -S--' 9-13^9 



UNITED STATES OF AMERJCA. 




A TRIBUTE 



Charles Sumner. 



C. A, BARTOL. 



O 



Senatorial Character: 



A SERMON 



West Church. Boston. 



Sunday, 15TH of March, 



AFTER THE 



DECEASE OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



By Cf^rAtK^BARTOL. 




BOSTON: 
A. WILLIAMS & CO., 135 WASHINGTON STREET. 

1874. 



415 



SERMON 



'■'■He ?nade him to teach his setiators wisdotn.'''' — Psalms cv, 21, 22. 

The common theory of the pulpit is of a place de- 
voted to expound some old situation, abstract scheme 
of salvation, or article in^a creed. It has a higher end, — 
to give the meaning of the scenes of real life, in which 
J we observe the actors and play ourselves a part. If 
history be philosophy teaching by example, and of all 
history biography be the soul, then human character, 
when rare and conspicuous in its traits or achieve- 
ments, gives as pattern or warning the chief lesson. 
Christian edification comes less signally from hair- 
splitting, dogmatic distinction than from contemplat- 
ing for imitation or adm^onition the lives of Enoch and 
Solomon, Paul and Peter, Jesus and John. So I take 
to-day the death of the most eminent civilian of Mas- 
sachusetts for my theme. 

As the King in Egypt chose Joseph to teach his 
senators wisdom, no man of late years has equalled 
Charles Sumner as an instructor or influence in the 
Senate of the United States. 

An instinct of nature prompts us to make some ac- 
count and sum up the significance of any one's career, 



4 

l^rivately, on the domestic stage, or before the people, 
if he has challenged attention in a larger sphere. 

It may be useful to make some discriminating esti- 
mate of Mr. Sumner's contributions to the public good, 
the legislature of a free State in a great Union being 
the monarch that for so long a period continued to 
elect him to his high office. 

However opinions may differ of his prudence or 
ability, the weight of his word or importance of his 
position none will doubt. i 

Our messenger of the lightning had no greater task 
this last week in the world than to w^ait at his thresh- 
old and run wath news every hour over the wires of 
his estate. * 

His principal peers at his bedside and his colored 
clients flocking for inquiry at his door showed a feel- 
ing of love and sympathy reaching from the highest 
to the lowest class. 

In culture he was a match for nobles, in temper he 
was a champion of the oppressed and friend to the 
poor. 

I suppose no American name is more widely known 
and celebrated in all civilized lands. 

Great Britain and France will feel the shock of his 
decease. 

That one of our political pillars has fallen will be 



5 

known at the Court of St. Petersburg and among the 
counsellors of Berlin. 

Italy and Spain, with their Republican struggles and 
aims, will miss an advocate on this side the sea. 

Castelar will mourn the departure of a companion 
in arms in the peaceful battles of reform, as Cavour 
might have felt through the cable from him for eman- 
cipation an electric touch. 

South America, with her strange mixture of barbar- 
ism with liberation, will be conscious of owing some 
honor to the obsequies of a sympathizer with all that 
is generous in her aspirations. 

. Hayti will deplore the decease of a supporter of her 
rights more powerful than any on her own shores. 

A flutter of pain and sorrow will pass through that 
whole flock of islands alighted, as in the great harbor 
of our land, betwixt the Gulf of Mexico and the Carib- 
bean Sea. 

So it will be because not only a man, a citizen of 
the Commonwealth and foremost trustee in the Con- 
gress of the country, but a cosmopolite is dead, deserv- 
ing that name as truly as any man who, since the set- 
tlement of these colonies, has lived within their bounds. 

What is the reason of the wide consequence of this 
event ? 

Not in the man's extraordinary original power. 



Nature did not intend aught intellectually pre-emi- 
nent in his constitution. 

It had no organic strength to strike out new paths 
in action or expression. 

It fell into ways other agents had broken. 

Mr. Sumner was not even an aboriginal abolitionist; 
he joined and did yeoman's service in the antislavery 
ranks. 

He startled the soldiers, twenty-nine years ago, in 
Boston, with his extreme doctrine of peace ; but he 
followed Ladd and others, with copious illustration, 
but no new sentiment or novel idea. 

Of origination there is no speck in his reflections or 
spark in his style. 

His mind is parasitical, his discourse full of prece- 
dents, quotations, classic scenes, and historic allusions, 
sometimes savoring of schoolboy recitations, sopho- 
moric and declamatory, stilted and grotesque. Yet he 
is in the list of wonderful men. Others thought and 
he was led to fancy some resemblance in his feature 
and .person to Edmund Burke, which the portrait of 
Mr. Burke might actually suggest ; but this resem- 
blance to the great English Commoner was but skin- 
deep, with little hint of the deep sea line that fathomed 
every question, or the impassioned imagination which 
cast the light of flame on every measure, and kindled 



7 

with magnetic sympathy, against the French Revolu- 
tion and for American privilege, now one and now 
another portion of the British realm. 

Mr. Sumner was perhaps a greater lover of freedom 
in its principle as an inherent right and claim of all 
mankind than Mr. Burke ; but Burke had pre-eminent 
genius in politics, Sumner only accomplished talent, 
though in the later light of a more humane era put to 
service in a grander cause. 

Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Newton, Burke, William 
Blake : such would be our shining classification for 
poetry, philosophy, science, politics, art, in the mother 
land. 

But for native force we should think of many per- 
sons before Sumner in his own field of study and pur- 
suit. 

He had not the majestic sweep of Webster, the 
weight or heat of that mountain with its base of granite 
and flame, the fiery eloquence of Clay, the close grip of 
John Ouincy Adams in argument, or the subtile felicity 
and gleam of primary perception which William Henry 
Seward brought for the enlivening of debate. 

He never could have invented the New-Yorker's 
phrase of The Irrepressible Co7tflict as applied to the 
Free and Slave States, or the Illinoisian Abraham 
Lincoln's grander adaptation of Scripture, — A house 



divided against itself cannot stand: I do not expect the 
house to fall, but to cease to be divided. 

Mr. Sumner quoted abundantly, but he is not for any 
rhetorical merits or ideal inventions in the whole ransfe 
of his voluminous works quotable, however rich in his 
right to be cited for the spirit and design on every 
page. 

He stands not strong among men of strength, think- 
ers and benefactors at first hand, germinators of thought 
and heroism in the van of the race, — such as bear the 
stamp of a primitive and primeval energy, like Abraham, 
Noah, Moses, David and Paul, Buddha and Moham- 
med, Socrates and Plato, in the East; Garrison and 
John Browai among ourselves. 

He was an orator of the conceptions of his predeces- 
sors and superiors, an arguer of the case, a sheriff to 
execute a writ. 

One name I do not mention in this comparison, 
because, being neither ancient nor modern, it is great- 
est of all. 

But if his were a secondary mind, a vine round a 
stouter trunk, how like some such creeper it towered 
and grew, ap])ropriated nourishment and vigor from 
the old decaying boughs, till at length, with superior 
toughness and tenacity, it could breast every breeze, and 
stood proudly alone ! 



9 

Yet his understanding was that not of the revealer, 
but the scholar to the last. He imparted what he 
learned; he knew what he had been told. His delivery- 
was not, like Patrick Henry's, a bolt from Heaven to 
rend the obstacle and burn up opposition, but a crystal 
stream flowing smoothly from some rock that had 
garnered up the mountain-dew and the rain; and he 
completely informed if he did not like Fisher Ames 
irresistibly charm. 

But in the moral region lay the real greatness of the 
man. His conscience was original and he had no 
original sin. 

No imputation on his purpose but cleared away like 
the cloud from a breath on spotless steel, leaving the 
metal bright as before. 

He was as incorruptible as he honorably said to me 
was Fessenden, his great rival in the Senate; and when 
he also one day, speaking of his limited means, re- 
marked: "I have never had the art to get my hands 
into the Treasury," I was fain to answer, " You the 
whole man are in the Treasury yourself." He was in- 
deed in our politics a fund and never-broken bank of 
moral wealth. Justice was his inspiration. He was a 
prophet by equity. Righteousness was his genius ; 
and humanity, in any lack of imagination, his insight 
and foresight. He was without spot. He wore 



lO 

ermine though he sat not on the bench. John Jay- 
had not cleaner hands, nor John Marshall a more 
honest will ; Hamilton and Jefferson were no more 
patriotic in contending than he in every legal or con- 
gressional strife ; and Story, his favorite teacher, and 
whose favorite pupil he was, no more ojDulent in knowl- 
edge or innocent in its use. 

As an antagonist, handling questions of motive or 
policy, he was as frank as the lion-hearted Richard and 
simple as a child. 

From those early debates to which I listened, on 
prison discipline, thirty years ago, to his latest speech 
on the Centennial Exhibition, this candor, amounting 
to generosity and magnanimity, was plain as the sun. 

He had no tricks, no management, no intrigue. He 
showed his hand. 

Could he not prevail by openness and sincerity, he 
would not prevail at all. 

If he started no new ideas or measures that have 
been adopted precisely in the way he conceived, or 
shape he gave, he mightily sustained all good ones, and 
of their goodness he would not abate a tithe. 

Of this rectitude benignity was the crown. Sternly 
exposing what he thought mean or unworthy in any pro- 
ceeding or adversary, his severity was in his argument 
and rhetoric rather than in the feeling of his soul. 



1 1 

Without a sweet disposition no man could have had 
such a smile. Without some o-randeur of desio-n no 
man ever displayed such a countenance and port, hand- 
some and sublime. In his intentness and earnestness, 
he did not suspect the liability of his expressions to the 
charge of a vindictiveness he was unconscious of in 
his own breast. It was like a philippic of Demosthenes ; 
it was a Ciceronian oration against some Catiline, real 
or supposed. A poetic sort of revenge was all he 
meant to take, although his language to opponents, 
whom perhaps he sometimes mistook, may be subject 
to blame. Pity he was so devoid of humor to recom- 
mend or soften his strokes ! 

His old peace doctrine, doubtless, mainly prompted 
his battle-flag resolution, while the time of offering it 
and his nearly contemporaneous break with his party 
seemed to betray an unfair and personal bias of 
which he was unaware. 

Sensible of his great and long importance to the 
government, an egoistic, assuming, imperious, irasci- 
ble inclination may to some have appeared to be dis- 
closed ; but he ingenuously felt he had a title to be 
consulted and that it was a slight and insult to set him 
aside. Let the administration that refused him as an 
instrument beware lest it become a hammer in the 
hands of inferior men, whose success will be sui- 



12 

cide, and itself the tool ! This may an inspiration 
from his coffin prevent ! Massachusetts has honored 
herself at least as much as she did her son, and cast 
from yonder halls one ray of comfort on his scat in the 
Senate and on his death-bed in rescinding the censure 
on his course ; for his memory is among her trophies, 
— no banner more so that hangs beneath the cupola 
above the marble floor, — and she is the inheritor of his 
renown ; for if " Providence made Washington childless 
that the country might call him father," Sumner is 
without offspring that the State may be his mourner. 

This freedom from all selfish heat or hate, one dis- 
tinction of the statesman from the politician, is a trait 
too rare to pass without emphasis and applause. 

An example, indeed, to the ordinary run of village 
contrivers, caucus packers, and municipal aspirants, of 
a man who never pulled a wire, rolled a log, laid a pipe, 
listened in a lobby', whispered in the ear what might 
not be proclaimed on the house-top, held a man by the 
button, or blew any trumpet but of the public good, 
however in his magnificent self-respect he might be 
falsely accused of wishing to blow only his own! 

If a jealous personal honor ever had apology or ex- 
cuse, it was how ample and entire in the case of a man — 
the only one in our annals — appointed to wear the 
shining crown of martyrdom before his translation, to 



13 

get up out of his own blood and recover from the foul 
assassin's bludgeon after medical tortures of the sur- 
geon's moxa in combustion on his disabled spine, such 
as Sequard says he never applied to any other living- 
creature.* 

So he rose to bear the same unflinching testimony, 
no more groaning under the fire of reproach than of 
the burning cotton; and if proud of his position, with 
perfect consistency modest too. 

I did not and at this distance of coolinof time do not 

O 

approve all the phraseology he employed on that sena- 
torial occasion; but his weapons were words, and, how- 
ever rough and affi-onting, for the right : those of his 
foes, equally gross and injurious, were for the wrong; 
and the assault of brutal force came to disturb the 
equation, in violation of all parliamentary privilege, 
with Douglas and his piratical compeers, with ill-dis- 
guised pleasure and half-pretended unconcern, looking 
on their own ignominy, crime, and shame, while the 
martyr that all but, yet not quite, expired, after years of 
suffering comes back, a resurrection witness not disposed 
of, and the assailant and would-be executioner dies 
long first, in Northern and Southern disgrace and his 
own remorse. 



* " Will chloroform make the operation less beneficial ? " he asked. " I 
couldnot lie," said the Doctor, 'and said, Yes." — "Then I will not take 
it," he replied. 



H 

At the same height with INIilton in his blindness, 
Sumner, with his torn and aching nerves, like a soldier 
who will not leave the field for loss of blood, resumed 
the conflict, struggling with disappointment and sorrow 
in age and loneliness, still moving ever immediately 
against all the powers of evil and works of the devil, his 
white plume, like that of the French Prince he quoted, 
floating ever ahead to follow ; like ex-President, Repre- 
sentative Adams, in his armor to the very edge and last 
of earth, like Buckle, talking in his agony of his book, 
and commending to survivors in Congress his beloved 
Civil Rights' Bill, dealing out well-directed blows for 
his race of every color and tribe till the instant the final 
stroke came to cut body and spirit apart. Truly, the 
halo of angelic glory hangs not only around the heads 
of dead saints ! Such a man might be tempted to 
claim the honor of his fellow-men, and a lofty self- 
esteem and aspiration to the highest dignities hardly 
misbecame him, who, like Cato, was wrapped in con- 
scious integrity, and established in the respect of all 
praiseworthy persons such a place. After the famous 
eulogy in his Phi Beta Kappa oration, of Pickering, 
Story, Allston, and Channing, the toast of John Ouincy 
Adams was : "The memory of the scholar, jurist, artist, 
and divine, — and not the memory, but the long life of 
the kindred genius that has embalmed them all." Yet 



15 

it has come for him also to a memory, and a noble one 
now. 

As a humble cotemporary I copy not others' im- 
pressions, but simply set down my own. Among his 
associates, the fault commonly found with Sumner is 
not that he was implacable — none easier to propitiate 
— but impracticable ; not an idealist, but ideologist 
and doctrinary dreamer of a peace and freedom on 
earth which he put into no effective and satisfactory 
form ; for ten thousand besides him recommended the 
Emancipation, which John Ouincy Adams held justifi- 
able as a war measure, and Lincoln proclaimed. 

But though the greatness of rulers and social 
founders is in what they establish and bring to pass, 
yet in default of this rare achievement, which happens 
seldom in the course of ages to any man, a certain 
impracticability is in others in many exigencies a 
blessing to be thankful for, a virtue to applaud. In 
the collisions of interest with principle are plenty to 
trim, compromise, and compound as oligarchs or dem- 
agogues bid ; but as the merit of some substances is 
the lack of ductility, so how oft we must lean on un- 
malleable men, whose back-bone is not supple as a uni- 
versal joint, who will not " crook the pregnant hinges of 
the knee where thrift may follow fawning," and who, in a 
noble discontent with all yet undertaken or done, sum- 



i6 

mon to worthier performance towards never-attained 
perfection in betterment of the common lot. Mr. Ru- 
binstein was displeased with the preacher who said, 
" Men must be expected to do no more than they can." 
" No," said the artist, " that doctrine letting down 
the standard is worse than actual vice. We can for- 
give the last, not the first ! " Men must do the impossi- 
ble, — a word which Napoleon told his officer was beast- 
ly, never to be spoken, and in his dictionary not found. 
" With God all things are possible," and that means 
possible to whoever works with Him. Said the pianist 
to his pupils, " If you do not expect or intend to write 
finer music than Beethoven, you have no business to 
compose at all." Mr. Sumner aimed at the sun ; and 
the feeling of philanthropic duty with which he stirred 
the body politic out of the custom of chronic oppression 
and old habit of wrong was of more precious conse- 
quence than carrying any particular scheme. With this 
earnestness, that would not stop short of improving 
the world, I was struck in my last conversation with 
him on the threatened Spanish war. If he did not 
interest or magnetize everybody, all individuals, like 
Crittenden or Clay, few cared more for their kind ; 
and this broad benevolence, as well as special affec- 
tion, lays hold on immortality. Who shall say such 
as Agassiz and Sumner are dead ? " A great man 



17 

has fallen," said my friend : no, a good man has 
risen. 

Death brings simplicity and realit3\ As it ap- 
proaches, learning and philosophy go ; goodness and 
conscience are left, the last guests in the feast of life 
at the table of the heart. In Sumner the sentimeiit^ 
foremost always, blooms at the pillow where last he 
laid, " so tired and weary," his head ; and sentiment, 
as well as science, has eternal claim. He extends 
courtesy to callers, opens his eye while it could open, 
waves his hand while it had strength to move, says Sit 
down to his old associate, tries to speak when the lips 
no longer obey .the will, and sends a legacy of love and 
reverence more precious than any gold to his old 
friend. Cold was he indeed t 

For his noble affections, how we shall remember tlffe 
solitary and little-related man, w^ith no children, when 
he was sad, to play with in his house ! His thirst for 
knowledge, his bent to investigate and study whatever 
had been said and done in the world, vv^ould have made 
him an antiquarian save for his patriotic and human- 
itarian zeal. 

What a lover and knower he was of pictures, bronzes, 
manuscripts, old books, curious relics of the j^ast, all 
memorials in all time of his fellow-men ! Such re- 
search is a sorj: of humanity. Yet no man's sympathies 

3 



i8 

were more in the present than his, or more eager to 
stretch after a perfected civilization in the future. 

Indeed, the millennial day shone so upon him 
through the vista of hope as to dazzle and blind him, 
like Saul on the road to Damascus, to the immediate 
possibilities of action and direct bearings of his theme. 

If there were any defect in his style, it was a certain 
lack of proportion, or an exceeding uniform stress, a 
straining forward against the leash of irrefragable cir- 
cumstance, till in the ardor of pursuit the perspective 
of the subject was lost. 

But whatever might be the lesser vices, the great 
virtues were in his judgment and thought. 

He was an admirable inciter. How we needed in- 
centives ! He hallooed to a grander chase than any 
iTuntsman's. He was the Lamartine of America, oitr 
orator of the human race. The Senate floor was to 
him a popular rostrum and sacred stump. He advo- 
cated every great cause if he found the key of none. 

He roused England and the United States, kindling 
into white heat, like dry wood, after such long season- 
ing, the Alabama difficulties, and compelling an atten- 
tion which doubtless was good for both parties, 
although his extravagant statement of the doctrine of 
consequential damages could not settle the question, 
and failed of the seal and sanction of international law. 



^9 

More human than divine, his inspiration came from 
without rather than from within. The first time I saw 
him, forty years ago, with the same characteristic 
ornate and fervent language, and garnish of Latin 
references, he elucidated to me the difference between 
a pettifogger or litigious searcher for cases — 2^ prcrco 
actiomim as he called him — and a jurist of the Judge 
Story stamp. 

Already he saw in faith the career for which he 
turned aside from every flattering offer that would 
divert him, conscious of superior ability to serve at the 
highest posts to which Democrat joined hands with 
Free Soiler to lead. Strange that the seemingly acci- 
dental, shall I say insincere, vote of a coalition should 
have furnished the most distinguished and perhaps 
longest continued Senator of the land! 

His empty chair on the Senate floor, drew, last 
week, at the obsequies, the spectators' eyes. 

But it was unoccupied that he might fill a higher 
seat prepared, waiting for, and needing, not the undying 
part but the everlasting whole ; for we are not whole 
till we drop our dust ! Three funeral-sensations, I re- 
member, — of Webster, the man of power, Lincoln, the 
man of providence, and Sumner, as I delight to call 
him, the man of purity. 

If the shadow of no demise ever brooded over this 



20 

region as a huge pall, a black sheet let down from the 
sky, like that of the great Nevv-Englander ; and if no 
jDLiblic sorrow in our day and generation was ever 
keener than when the martyr-president gave up the 
ghost at the revengeful stroke of the monster of 
political slavery, expiring, like a leviathan, under his 
hand ; never was a more genuine tribute than will be 
laid on the Senators tomb, or a completer satisfaction 
in an ended testimony and finished work, whatever 
part he left for us to finish. Several years ago, forced 
by illness away from the theatre of public duties and 
affairs into a country refuge, as the sounds came soft- 
ened by distance from the arena at the capitol where 
the combatants struggled together, however pleasantly 
fell the counsels of moderation and prudence on my 
ear, I recognized the clarion of Sumner, urging to 
absolute truth and honor, and, far or near, resounding 
above them all. 

Here was a man that could not bend or yield, alloy 
or qualify, surrender or retreat. Here was an incor- 
ruptibility proof against bribes, and too original in 
legislatives halls, an originality, if not of suggestion 
yet of heroic act. Here was an obstinacy not of 
will, but idea ; for ideas are more obstinate than any 
human will in the world. Here was a necessity not of 
whim but duty, such as was laid on the great apostle 



21 

to the Gentiles to preach the Gospel, and drove Luth- 
er to the Diet of Worms. I aim at simple truth as I 
speak Such stubbornness will surely accomplish 
great results and always fetch an echo from the human 
breast. I abstain from overstatement. Love must not 
falsify or exaggerate. It is no compliment to exalt 
another by belying ourselves. Our friend belongs to 
history now ; and the offerings of a discriminating re- 
spect are part of its material. I must think of him 
less as hewn by the Divinity than carving himself. 
Like one of the straws a swallow bears to build its 
nest, let my poor word go to the fashioning by many 
hands, of the niche of his fame. His head had its 
limits ; but there was no outside to his heart ! The 
great man's servant, secretary, keeper of his house, 
farmer of his estate, has something valuable to say of 
him ; and the humblest coeval's contribution will not 
be refused or despised. Voicing the feeling of no par- 
ty, for him or against, I but touch the ground of that 
secret respect to his character and aim which not only 
favorers but foes are constrained, unitedly, unanimous- 
ly, instinctively, to pay. 

'•'Little heeds he what is said ; 
They have done with all below ; " 

Such were the commonplaces of the old theology 



22 

founded on the notion of a senseless rest of the dead, 
or their departure to an infinite distance from our 
earthly abode. But we reconsider such views. He, 
who was so sensitive to his fellow-citizens' regard, can 
hardly be insensible now, or unconscious of our sincere 
honor. I would speak as in his presence and to his 
ear ! His clear voice will be no longer heard in our 
assemblies, or his commanding form cast its welcome 
shadow through our streets. 

But the moral stature, with which, as in mental 
height, he transcended the common sons of men, shall 
be seen and felt. 

Nor can the recollection for ages pass how, as a 
brave knight, with superb courage, horsed on ideas for 
the saving of the land, he flung defiance from boldness 
unsurpassed at the giant wrong, — that dragon and old 
serpent, the form Satan took for us, the Barbarism of 
Slavery, and Slavery seclional not national^ as he eji- 
titled the greatest speeches he made. His some- 
what artificial manner, method, and phrase only clothed 
or cloaked an indigenous force of conscience, which 
was a piece of nature, a divine monolith or monogram, 
if his intellect were not. His meaning no man, white 
or black, in the land doubted or could misunderstand.. 

If his forensic efforts had been to a nice taste better 
in some respects, the improvement might have made 



23 

them in others for general effect worse or of less effect. 
They were at least faithfully prepared from a width of 
observation and stock of information seldom equalled, 
and set forth with a consecutive order of formal logic 
worthy of a master in the schools. 

Twice has been his conspicuous entry into this 
town : first, after he was outraged for his freedom of 
utterance in his place ; next, yesterday, in whatever 
connection the spirit may have with the forsaken robe 
which it cannot desert or lose all feeling for at once. 

How, but as a man of principle, shall he stand for- 
ever in our memory and in the human mind ? Let 
his name, like that of Washington, be a lasting rebuke 
to venality, selfish ambition, bribery, and all political 
intrio^ue ! He is one more added to the band of 
blessed bigots which, wiser than any conformists, all 
our pilgrim fathers were. 

•" You can rest soon," he said to the familiar friend 
and companion in clerkly labor who was rubbing the 
hands fast growing cold in death. No chafing can re- 
store what turns to the clay of which it was made. 
The flowers you form into his name will fade, but to 
cherish his honor we will never cease. Let his body 
be " buried in peace : his name liveth evermore." 



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